II. The Psychological Foundations of Anthroposophy

Through such a manner of conceiving in relation to the theory of knowledge, conflict could be decisively eliminated between natural science, with its inclination toward materialism, and a spiritual research, which presupposes the spiritual. For a right of way should be established for natural scientific research, in that it could investigate the laws of the bodily organization uninfluenced by interference from a spiritual manner of thinking. If one wishes to know according to what laws the reflected image comes into existence, one must give attention to the laws of the mirror. This determines how the beholder is reflected; it occurs in different ways depending on whether one has a plane, concave, or convex mirror. But the being of the person who is reflected is outside the mirror. One could thus see in the laws to be discovered through natural scientific research the reasons for the form of the empirical consciousness, and with these laws nothing should be mixed of what spiritual science has to say about the inner life of man's core of being. Within natural scientific research one will always rightly oppose the interference of purely spiritual points of view. It is natural that, in the area of this research, there is more sympathy with explanations which are given in a mechanistic way than with spiritual laws. A conception such as the following must be congenial to one who is at home in clear natural scientific conceptions: “The fact of consciousness brought about by the stimulation of brain cells does not belong in a class essentially different from that of gravity connected with matter” (Moriz Benedikt).